Social and economic development of underdeveloped & developing countries bringing about an equitable growth eradicating the poverty, hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy and providing the poor better livelihood options...

Dear Readers,Please Give Comments, Like and Send in Facebook, Subscribe this via RSS or E mail. Become a follower of this site through Google Friend Connect or Google reader or Blogger.... Feel free to email me at sadhubani@gmail.comfor anything...

Budget of a government is
a comprehensive statement of government finances relating to a particular year.
Every Budget broadly consists of two parts- (i) Expenditure Budget and (ii) Receipts
Budget.

The amounts of intended expenditure
by the Government in the next financial year are expressed in the Expenditure Budget.

The entire Expenditure
Budget can be divided into two distinct categories, viz.

i) Capital Expenditure : those expenditures by the government that lead to an increase
in the assets or a reduction in the liabilities of the government. It is
however not necessary that the assets created should be productive or they
should even be revenue generating. Only the charges towards the construction of
the asset are counted as Capital expenditure, while the subsequent charges for
its maintenance are considered as Revenue expenditure. Most capital expenditure
is nonrecurring.

- Examples of Capital Expenditure
causing ‘increase in assets’: construction of a new Flyover, Union Govt. giving
a Loan to a State Govt.

- Examples of Capital Expenditure
causing ‘reduction of a liability’: Union Govt. repays the principal amount of
a loan it had taken in the past.

ii) Revenue Expenditure : those expenditures by the government that do not affect its
asset-liability position. Most kinds of revenue expenditures are seen as recurring
expenditures. The entire amount of Grants given by the Union Government to
States is reported in the Union Budget as Revenue Expenditure, even though a
part of those Grants get utilized by States for building Schools, Hospitals
etc. This is so because the ownership of the schools or hospitals built from
the Central grants would not be with the Union Government.

Total government
expenditure can also be divided into another set of categories, viz.

i) Plan Expenditure : Plan expenditure refers to government expenditure, which is meant for financing the
programmes/schemes formulated under the ongoing/ previous five year Plan.

ii) Non-Plan Expenditure
: Expenditure of the government, which are not included
under the Plan Expenditure are called Non-Plan Expenditure. It includes some of
the important types of government expenditure, eg: interest payments, pension, defence
expenditure, spending on law and order, spending on legislature, subsidies, and
salary of regular cadre teachers, doctors and other government officials.

The Receipts Budget
presents the information on how much the Government intends to collect as its financial resources for meeting its expenditure requirements and from which sources, in the next
fiscal year. This can also be divided into two categories:

i) Capital Receipts- those receipts that lead to a reduction in the assets or an
increase in the liabilities of the government.

-Capital Receipts that
lead to a ‘reduction in assets’: Recoveries of Loans given by the government
and Earnings from Disinvestment;

- Capital Receipts that
lead to an ‘increase in liabilities’: Debt.

ii) Revenue Receipts- those receipts that don’t affect the asset-liability position
of the government. Revenue Receipts comprise proceeds of Taxes (like, Income
Tax,corporation Tax, Customs, Excise,
Service Tax, etc.) and Non-tax revenue of the government (like, Interest Receipts, Fees/ User Charges, and Dividend & Profits from PSUs).

Government revenue
through taxation can be divided into Direct Taxes and Indirect Taxes.

Direct Taxes:

Those taxes for which the tax-burden cannot be shifted are
called Direct Taxes. Examples of Direct Taxes are:

i) Corporation Tax- This is a tax levied on the income of registered companies in
the country, whether national or foreign, under
the Income Tax Act, 1961.

ii) Personal Income tax- This is a tax on the income of individuals,
firms etc. other than Companies, under the
Income Tax Act, 1961. This head also includes other Taxes, mainly the
‘Securities Transaction Tax’, which is levied
on transaction in listed securities undertaken on stock exchanges and in units
of mutual funds.

iii) Wealth Tax- This is a tax levied on the benefits derived
from the ownership of property, under the Wealth
Tax Act, 1957. Wealth tax has virtually been abolished in India.

Indirect Taxes:

Those taxes for which the
tax-burden can be shifted are called Indirect Taxes. Any person, who directly pays
this kind of a tax to the Government, need not bear the burden of that particular
tax; he she can ultimately shift the tax burden to other persons later through
business transactions of goods/ services. Indirect tax on any good or service
affects the rich and the poor alike! Unlike indirect taxes, direct taxes are linked
to the tax-payee’s ability to pay and hence are considered to be progressive.
Examples of Indirect Taxes are:

i) Customs Duties-In
this, the taxable component is import into or export from the country.

ii) Excise Duties: It is a type of tax levied on those goods,
which are manufactured in the country and are meant for domestic consumption.
It is a tax on manufacturing, which is paid by the manufacturer, but he passes
this burden on to the consumers.

iii) Sales Tax: It is levied on the sale of a commodity, which
is produced/imported and being sold for the first time. If the product is sold subsequently
without being processed further, it is exempt from sales tax. Before the introduction
of VAT, sales tax used to be levied under he authority of both Central Legislation
(Central Sales Tax) and State Government’s Legislation (Sales Tax)

iv) Service Tax: It
is a tax levied on services provided by a person and the responsibility of
payment of the tax is cast on the service provider. However this tax can be recovered
by the service provider from the service receiver in course of his/her business
transactions.

v) Value Added Tax
(VAT): VAT is a multi-stage tax, intended to tax every stage of sale of a
good where some value has been added to the raw materials; but taxpayers do
receive credit for tax already paid on the raw materials in earlier stages.

Debt and Deficit

A Debt is a kind of
receipt that necessarily leads to an increase of the government’s liabilities. The
government incurs a Debt only for meeting the gap created by excess of its
expenditure over its receipts for that year, which is called Deficit.

Fiscal Deficit

It is the gap between the
government’s total Expenditure (including loans net of repayments) and its
Total Receipts (excluding new debt to be taken). Thus Fiscal Deficit for a year
indicates the borrowing to be made by the government that year.

Revenue Deficit

The gap between Total
Revenue Expenditure of the Government and its Total Revenue Receipts is called the Revenue Deficit

Distribution of financial resources between the Centre and the
States-

A Finance Commission is
set up every five years to recommend measures for sharing of resources between
the Centre and the States, mainly pertaining to the Tax Revenue collected by
the Central Government. Presently the recommendations made by the 13th Finance
Commission are in effect (from 2010-11 to 2014-15), whereby 32 percent of
the shareable /divisible pool of Central tax revenue is transferred to States
every year and the Centre retains the remaining amount for the Union Budget.

Tax-GDP Ratio

Gross Domestic Product
(GDP) is an indicator of the size of a country’s
economy. In order to assess the extent of government’s policy interventions in
the economy, some of the important fiscal parameters, like, total expenditure
by the government, tax revenue, deficit etc. are expressed as a proportion of
the GDP. Accordingly, a country’s tax-GDP ratio helps us understand how much
tax revenue is being collected by the government as compared to the overall
size of the economy. A higher tax to GDP ratio in a country is a positive sign meaning
that the government is collecting a decent amount of tax revenue as compared to
the size of its economy.